Colorblind
by VampedVixen
Summary: Micah thinks about what being different means.


_This was written for Heroes Holidays, a challenge where you write a fic for as many holidays during the year as possible. This one is for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day._

* * *

The first time Micah knew for sure that there was something strange about his family, he was in second grade. Up until then, he could never understand why his family attracted occasional stares from people in the street or the low murmuring when they rode the bus together. They were just different for some reason.

It was Sally Johnson, the pretty blond girl from third grade who always wore her hair up in two carefully managed pigtails, that put it to him bluntly. They sat in front of the school in the hot desert afternoon, waiting for their parents to pick them up when she began badgering him. "My mom says that your dad doesn't love your mom."

"What?!" Micah's father always told him to never hit a woman. It was the first rule of being a man but the boy couldn't help wanting to deck this girl. The teachers were watching though, he couldn't get into a fight here. He shouldered his backpack and resisted the urge to punch as best he could.

"She says 'certain people shouldn't mix with other people'." She sounded as if she was repeating the statement word for word, straight from the mouth of her own mother. They were rich folks, with proper manners which made it all the more difficult for Micah to believe what he was hearing. "She says they should stick with their own race."

Micah thought carefully about the word _race_, he couldn't remember ever coming across it before and it wasn't on any of the vocabulary worksheets his teachers handed out. "What's that? Like running around in gym class?"

"Second graders." She rolled her eyes towards the heavens, as if to ask for God's help in dealing with that were so much younger than her. "Sheesh! No.. race means like white skin or being from China like Ming in Ms. Palmer's class. Your parents are weird cause they're not the same."

Micah pulled his lips into a pout, not eager to talk anymore with the girl. He stayed quiet as parents came to collect the last few stragglers left at the school. Ming hugged his mother when she arrived. She had the same almond eyes as him, the same smooth, pale skin. Sally was brought home by her tall, blond father, who she resembled quite a bit. Everyone seemed to have their match, their equal pair.

He was the last student still at school when his mother picked him up. She rolled down the car window, her bright smile matching her bright blond hair. He looked down at his own two dark hands, ones that didn't match and were different from his mother's pair. They were extra dirty from playing in the sand box during recess; he scrapped at the dirt under his fingernails in vain.

"Hey, Micah. How was school?"

He climbed into the car, upset by a secret he couldn't share. "It was fine."

* * *

That week, Micah noticed the color of everything and kept a running tally of the score. 

The walls in his room, the curtains in the kitchen and the tiles in the bathroom were white. Like his mother. The driveway was black, along with the kitchen table and his computer keyboard. Just like his father.

He couldn't find anything that was black AND white, except that old joke. What was black and white and red all over? The answer was his face-- when he grew embarrassed by Sally's teasing and taunts.

* * *

In second grade, the first assignment Micah received from his teacher was for each student to go out and buy their own copy of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. It would be a valuable tool in practicing their vocabulary. 

His father brought him to the bookstore that night to find a good copy. His parents always made sure he had everything he needed: food, clothing, a place to sleep and all the books he could possibly read in one school year.

They're the best parents anyone could have but questions still lingered in the back of his mind. There were things that none of them spoke about, quiet words hinted at by their neighbors when those people thought his parents weren't paying attention. Micah heard them all and made it a point to look them up at night, after his mother and father were sleeping.

Caucasian - Adjective - of or relating to the white race of humankind as classified according to physical features

Biracial – Adjective - having parents of two different races.

Mulatto – Noun - the offspring of one white parent and one black parent

He searched his new dictionary for the word 'nigger' too but it wasn't in there. It can't be anything good, judging by his father's reaction after the man from the supermarket screamed it out during their argument. Micah made it a point never to add that word to his own vocabulary.

All the information found between the covers of that very heavy book still didn't help Micah figured out what he needed so desperately to know. Why can't angry people just call him by his name instead of using mean words? What made him so different? Did his parents really love each other even though they weren't the same?

He promised himself the answers, even if he needed to ask those questions the hard way.

* * *

"Mom, do you love daddy?" 

"Of course, silly. That's why I married him." His mother folded the last of the towels, a white one with blue stripes. She placed it on the pile with the others before ruffling his hair. "Why would you ask something like that?"

"I was just wondering." He shrugged, hoping that his mother didn't catch the worry in his voice. "But you really do love him, I mean, you're sure?"

"Oh Micah, I've loved your father since I first met him. We went to high school together. He was always hanging around with me trying to act all cool. Our friends thought we were nuts when we said we were going to get married, but we're still happy together and that's what counts. He's been through so much with me.. I couldn't imagine my life without him."

Micah smiled broadly, jumping up to wrap his arms around his mother's waist. He couldn't imagine his life without both of them either. "I love you, mom."

She laughed. "What brought this on, honey?"

"I just figured something out. Something that's been bothering me for a long time."

* * *

Micah sat at his piano. It wasn't a baby grand like they had in the band room at school, just a simple keyboard but it was good enough to practice on. Even at nine-years-old, his tiny fingers found no difficulty playing the Mozart's 23rd Concerto. His parents thought he would be playing opera houses by the time he reached his teens. 

While he watched his fingers tickled the ebony and ivory keys, he decided to try an experiment. He carefully selected the notes to play, only hitting the ones sounded from the white keys, leaving out the accidental notes. It didn't sound right.

He switched it the other way around, only playing the black keys. It was just as bad; the poor, little ditty made him long for the more completeness found only by using the full set. For a concerto to really work and the magic to come alive underneath his fingertips, he needed to play the whole song. Every note. Every key.

* * *

That week, he found no difficulty in naming things that were black and white. 

Dalmatians, like the one the firehouse kept as a pet and let ride around on their fire engine trucks.

Then there were Oreos, possibly the best cookie ever dunked in milk.

And old photographs of people in love and of families which shared lives and lived together.

* * *

Two years later, after New York City almost exploded and his father was rushed to the emergency room, Micah curled up against his mother. They waited for the doctors to tell them anything, so they could breath again or prepare for the worse. Micah hated not knowing what was going on, if he was inside the emergency room maybe he could talk to the surgical machines, tell them that his father couldn't die and that his mother would be heartbroken if anything bad happened. 

They were a family, no matter how strange that might look to the outside world.

"Maybe I could do something," he raised the subject with his mother for the fifth time since arriving at the hospital. "I could be a superhero and save dad. It would be easy."

"Don't worry. The doctors are doing all they can." His mother held him tightly and Micah worried whether he was her rock, whether he had to keep her tethered to reality or else she might get lost too. "And what's all this talk I hear about you being a superhero?"

"Don't you like being different, mom?" He didn't want her to give up on her gifts, on her powers.

"Being different is hard work, Micah-- you're too young to really understand what it can cost you."

"Being different isn't so bad." He countered, sounding too wise for his young age. He'd long ago accepted that he wasn't like other kids. He liked computers, while the rest of his class liked sports. He could talk to machines and get them to talk back. And, yes, his blood came from his mother who was blond, strong and powerful and his dark-skinned father who always put his family first. "I kinda like it."

-The End-


End file.
